5 ms·

Toyota halts all self-driving e-Palette vehicles after Olympic village accident

77 points by georgecmu 5y ago

oconnor663 5y ago
> The vehicle had stopped at a T junction and was about to turn under manual control of the operator, who was using the vehicle's joystick control, when the vehicle hit the athlete going at around 1 or 2 kilometres an hour, Toyoda said. So...this was not a self-driving accident? Seems like a pretty important detail to be buried halfway down the article.
- lumost 5y ago
  Could be a safety problem with joystick control. If they deemed the manual control interface a safety risk it could require heavy redesign.
- bserge 5y ago
  Apparently not, from all the other articles I read. Putting them on halt... Goddamn, never underestimate the power of the media. If all these fuckers report it as "self driving car hits blind man", you're fucked, not them for misrepresenting the facts.
  - cge 5y ago
    Except it appears that Toyota itself is pushing the anti-self-driving line here as well. I'm certainly skeptical of some claims about self-driving, can understand that there are differences in being apologetic, and can understand the choice to suspend operations, but it's an odd jump to have your CEO say that this incident "shows that autonomous vehicles are not yet realistic for normal roads."
    - bserge 5y ago
      I'd chalk it up to the Japanese way of doing things, but I'm not sure.
    - shawnz 5y ago
      Perhaps he is trying to get ahead of any arguments like, "the drivers weren't paying attention due to over-reliance on the software"
    - toiletaccount 5y ago
      They aren't exactly leading the pack in self driving tech, why not try slowing down the whole race after a good stumble?
    - aitchnyu 5y ago
      Hmm, now I'm learning Toyota is sabotaging both full electric and autonomous driving.
  - ramesh31 5y ago
    >Putting them on halt... Goddamn, never underestimate the power of the media. I'd chalk this up more to Toyota. They are an extremely risk averse company. "“It shows that autonomous vehicles are not yet realistic for normal roads,” (Akio Toyoda) said." What other CEO do you know that would straight up admit their technology was at fault and is not ready for widespread use?
    - bserge 5y ago
      When it comes to Japan, quite a few. They're surprisingly eager to take all the blame in hopes of pacifying the media and people.
      - diskzero 5y ago
        As an outsider, I have always respected the Japanese tradition of leaders accepting blame and making apologies. It seems that this would short-circuit the outrage driven media cycles that thrive in America. Is this the case in Japan? Do these apologies have a postive affect?
        bobthepanda 5y ago
        Corporate malfeasance manifests itself behind closed doors. https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/21/toshiba_effissimo_meti_scandal/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/21/toshiba_effissimo_met... > Toshiba’s first big mess was the 2015 accountancy scandal in which it admitted to over-stating revenue by $1.2 billion. Next came a mess at Toshiba’s US-based nuclear power plant business, which went so far over budget on some projects that the company had to sell its NAND flash chip joint venture with Western Digital to raise desperately needed cash. Those two messes saw Toshiba pledge to improve its corporate governance. Ahead of the company’s 2020 annual general meeting, activist investors sought to accelerate that change by proposing the election of new officers untainted by the company’s troubles. That effort failed, and one of the activist investors — Singaporean fund management company Effissimo capital management — smelled a rat. It sought to investigate what it thought were irregularities in the way the meeting was conducted. > Toshiba’s report from that investigation was released ten days ago, and its findings [PDF] include an explosive account of Toshiba and Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry conspiring to “beat up” Effissimo by threatening to act under Japan’s foreign investment laws, before suggesting new governance-related appointments that suited Toshiba more than Effissimo. The investigation also alleges that Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga was aware of the plan to use the Ministry to stymie Effissimo. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/02/15/business/corporate-business/toshibas-latest-scandal-subsidiary-found-booked-%C2%A543-5-billion-fictitious-sales/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/02/15/business/corpor... > Toshiba Corp. said Friday that a subsidiary booked fictitious sales of ¥43.5 billion in 26 transactions recorded only on paper... Nine companies including Toshiba IT-Services were found to have been involved in “round-tripping transactions” that did not involve any commercial goods or end users, according to information mainly from a report about an in-house survey involving lawyers and certified accountants.
- phreeza 5y ago
  From the initial reporting it sounded like there was some kind of "just go" button that overrode the safeties, in which case I would have attributed it to poor self-driving design anyway. But "joystick control" sounds like the driver was much more actively engaged, which is the right thing to require in disengagement situation in my view.
  - dmix 5y ago
    All of the recent self driving cars have an override method so the driver can take over. There’s no getting around that. The only thing you can blame here is the human driver not trusting the system which did make the right choice. You could blame training but again it’s not the software to blame. This is the second article that obscured that fact.
    - jimmaswell 5y ago
      This has been a sadly common clickbait/FUD tactic since self driving launched. Another example: https://www.reddit.com/r/savedyouaclick/comments/d35vp9/self_driving_shuttle_crashes_in_las_vegas_hours/ https://www.reddit.com/r/savedyouaclick/comments/d35vp9/self...
    - trhway 5y ago
      >self driving cars have an override method so the driver can take over. There’s no getting around that. you'd expect that self-driving car would have a driver assist like on a regular car which prevents or warns about hitting objects/people. In general, seeing Toyota's self-driving cars around MV, they have too few sensors for my taste (compare to Google, Apple, and a bunch of other SD cars driving around). It seems to me that the hardware companies don't get it, and thus only buying the tech like GM Cruise is the possible way for them to move forward.
    - phreeza 5y ago
      I agree that some kind of fallback is unavoidable at the current level of technology, but the design is critical. Having a "just go" button that disables the safeties and let's the self-driving continue against its own better judgement is very convenient when it works, but terrible design because it trains the safety driver to just always hit it. Having some more active engagement like a joystick, that forces the safety driver to engage with the situation, seems much more reasonable.
- notahacker 5y ago
  It's pretty ambiguous from that wording whether the "self driving" was at fault or not (if a vehicle had stopped and the manual operative was about to do something it could easily imply the vehicle's computer then behaved unpredictably in a way the joystick didn't cancel out). Possibly because Toyota themselves haven't analysed the telemetry enough to know what caused it yet
- jsight 5y ago
  Yeah, it is an important detail. But it'd be nice if we had some more details available, like whether or not it was common to have to override the car. I'd expect that might be common at these crossings, and they may have found a significant issue with something like warning/override fatigue or with the controller interface. It makes sense to stop them until they can figure out with certainty why the operator may have made this mistake.
brianwawok 5y ago
> The vehicle had stopped at a T junction and was about to turn under manual control of the operator, who was using the vehicle's joystick control, when the vehicle hit the athlete going at around 1 or 2 kilometres an hour, Toyoda said A driver ran over someone while turning. Not sure this has anything to do with self driving except for the click bait?
- dicroce 5y ago
  If a remote human controlled car accident causes them to end development of self driving, then they were looking to do that anyway.
  - ugjka 5y ago
    This is Japan and their culture. If this happened to Tesla, Elon would just tweet something
  - josefx 5y ago
    The headline is click bait. They only stopped use at the Olympic village.
  - nonbirithm 5y ago
    They're planning to build an entire city/small town based around autonomous vehicles near Mt. Fuji. https://www.thestreet.com/phildavis/news/toyota-is-building-its-own-autonomous-city-next-to-mount-fuji https://www.thestreet.com/phildavis/news/toyota-is-building-...
- gregoriol 5y ago
  Maybe the manual controls have a problem, or the mix of self-driving/manual caused a problem? The article doesn't say much, but it may have to do with the design of the system (and not the self-driving itself)
  - krisoft 5y ago
    > The article doesn't say much, but it may have to do with the design of the system I'm thinking the same. Obviously I don't know nothing factual. Was looking at this video of how the shuttles look from the inside: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp9DNV0zGC8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp9DNV0zGC8 I observed these things: - it looks like at least on this video the shuttles appear to be in manual operation. - the A pillar is crazy thick. One could hide a whole circus with elephants behind it from the driver. - maybe because of the above, the driver has video screens in front of them. - there appears to be two on-board attendants (a hostess and a driver it seems)
5faulker 5y ago
Reading this while eating.
- rnjesus 5y ago
  you can’t just stop the story there..
gundmc 5y ago
> “It shows that autonomous vehicles are not yet realistic for normal roads,” he said. Yes, clearly this wasn't Toyota's mistake and is instead a reflection of the entire industry. Nice spin.
- plutonorm 5y ago
  They are losing to Tesla and they know it. They would rather trash the whole industry than let someone else win
  - curiousgal 5y ago
    > Tesla > Self-driving Pick one.
    - bpodgursky 5y ago
      You might not like _how_ Tesla is deploying self-driving, but it would be silly to challenge that they are at minimum tied for the lead right now.
      - jazzyjackson 5y ago
        Tied for the lead in "most likely to get self driving cars banned" sure
- mdoms 5y ago
  Are you saying that autonomous vehicles are ready for normal roads?
  - minhazm 5y ago
    The point here is that this incident doesn’t show anything about autonomous cars, good or bad. This car was actually under a manual operators control at the time of the accident. Also Toyota’s tech is not reflective of everyone else’s tech, there are many different approaches and they’re at very different stages of development.
nashashmi 5y ago
The executive is way too polite compared to the nonsense we are used to hearing from Elon Musk.
gjkood 5y ago
"In a YouTube video, Toyota Chief Executive Akio Toyoda apologized for the incident and said he offered to meet the person but was unable to do so." Is it just me or does it feel refreshing to hear a CEO accepting some responsibility involving one of it's products regardless of what the investigation may finally reveal as the root cause. The buck does indeed stop at his desk.
- redwall_hp 5y ago
  It's very common with Japanese companies. You should see the statements Naoki Yoshida puts out for Final Fantasy XIV (and he's not even Square Enid's CEO). The player population exploded this summer, causing long login queues and various capacity issues, resulting in an open letter apologizing profusely for not being able to keep up with demand. > As producer, the responsibility for being unable to predict the current influx of new players falls to me. The days before an expansion’s launch are supposed to be ones of excitement, but instead they’ve brought many players grief, and for that I, personally, am extremely sorry. (Excerpted from a long and detailed message that explains the situation, including the semiconductor shortage.) https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/topics/detail/c2d7b35d55577879086b64cfde0acb6c23ccd07f https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/topics/detail/c2d7b... When was the last time you saw a company apologize for their service being too popular?
  - harry8 5y ago
    >When was the last time you saw a company apologize for their service being too popular? January this year that I can recall. https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1350638559301013511 https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1350638559301013511
  - thatguy0900 5y ago
    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/japanese-company-apologises-for-9-cent-price-increase-a6972566.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/japanese-co... the cultural differences really are crazy. Here the company would act like it's a good thing
digitcatphd 5y ago
“ Toyoda said the accident showed the difficulty for the self-driving vehicle to operate in the special circumstances..” Toy Yoda is all knowing
avastmick 5y ago
The vehicles have since restarted.[1] I think that Toyota's position on AVs is largely counter to the rest of the market, and the CE largely states this in his post-incident briefing. They see the AV market as more a tram-like shuttle experience [2], so limited in scope, rather than full on Level 5. Toyota's contrary position is similar to their position to BEVs, where the CEO has stated he sees hydrogen as the solution, not batteries. In each case their position is possibly out of date given the advances made in both AVs and battery technology developed elsewhere. [1] https://electrek.co/2021/08/30/toyota-resumes-self-driving-operations-at-paralympic-games-ceo-remains-skeptical-of-autonomous-progress/ https://electrek.co/2021/08/30/toyota-resumes-self-driving-o... [2] https://digital.hbs.edu/platform-rctom/submission/toyotas-answer-to-the-self-driving-era/ https://digital.hbs.edu/platform-rctom/submission/toyotas-an...

77 points by georgecmu 5y ago

> The vehicle had stopped at a T junction and was about to turn under manual control of the operator, who was using the vehicle's joystick control, when the vehicle hit the athlete going at around 1 or 2 kilometres an hour, Toyoda said. So...this was not a self-driving accident? Seems like a pretty important detail to be buried halfway down the article.

lumost 5y ago
Could be a safety problem with joystick control. If they deemed the manual control interface a safety risk it could require heavy redesign.
bserge 5y ago
Apparently not, from all the other articles I read. Putting them on halt... Goddamn, never underestimate the power of the media. If all these fuckers report it as "self driving car hits blind man", you're fucked, not them for misrepresenting the facts.
- cge 5y ago
  Except it appears that Toyota itself is pushing the anti-self-driving line here as well. I'm certainly skeptical of some claims about self-driving, can understand that there are differences in being apologetic, and can understand the choice to suspend operations, but it's an odd jump to have your CEO say that this incident "shows that autonomous vehicles are not yet realistic for normal roads."
  - bserge 5y ago
    I'd chalk it up to the Japanese way of doing things, but I'm not sure.
  - shawnz 5y ago
    Perhaps he is trying to get ahead of any arguments like, "the drivers weren't paying attention due to over-reliance on the software"
  - toiletaccount 5y ago
    They aren't exactly leading the pack in self driving tech, why not try slowing down the whole race after a good stumble?
  - aitchnyu 5y ago
    Hmm, now I'm learning Toyota is sabotaging both full electric and autonomous driving.
- ramesh31 5y ago
  >Putting them on halt... Goddamn, never underestimate the power of the media. I'd chalk this up more to Toyota. They are an extremely risk averse company. "“It shows that autonomous vehicles are not yet realistic for normal roads,” (Akio Toyoda) said." What other CEO do you know that would straight up admit their technology was at fault and is not ready for widespread use?
  - bserge 5y ago
    When it comes to Japan, quite a few. They're surprisingly eager to take all the blame in hopes of pacifying the media and people.
    - diskzero 5y ago
      As an outsider, I have always respected the Japanese tradition of leaders accepting blame and making apologies. It seems that this would short-circuit the outrage driven media cycles that thrive in America. Is this the case in Japan? Do these apologies have a postive affect?
      - bobthepanda 5y ago
        Corporate malfeasance manifests itself behind closed doors. https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/21/toshiba_effissimo_meti_scandal/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/21/toshiba_effissimo_met... > Toshiba’s first big mess was the 2015 accountancy scandal in which it admitted to over-stating revenue by $1.2 billion. Next came a mess at Toshiba’s US-based nuclear power plant business, which went so far over budget on some projects that the company had to sell its NAND flash chip joint venture with Western Digital to raise desperately needed cash. Those two messes saw Toshiba pledge to improve its corporate governance. Ahead of the company’s 2020 annual general meeting, activist investors sought to accelerate that change by proposing the election of new officers untainted by the company’s troubles. That effort failed, and one of the activist investors — Singaporean fund management company Effissimo capital management — smelled a rat. It sought to investigate what it thought were irregularities in the way the meeting was conducted. > Toshiba’s report from that investigation was released ten days ago, and its findings [PDF] include an explosive account of Toshiba and Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry conspiring to “beat up” Effissimo by threatening to act under Japan’s foreign investment laws, before suggesting new governance-related appointments that suited Toshiba more than Effissimo. The investigation also alleges that Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga was aware of the plan to use the Ministry to stymie Effissimo. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/02/15/business/corporate-business/toshibas-latest-scandal-subsidiary-found-booked-%C2%A543-5-billion-fictitious-sales/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/02/15/business/corpor... > Toshiba Corp. said Friday that a subsidiary booked fictitious sales of ¥43.5 billion in 26 transactions recorded only on paper... Nine companies including Toshiba IT-Services were found to have been involved in “round-tripping transactions” that did not involve any commercial goods or end users, according to information mainly from a report about an in-house survey involving lawyers and certified accountants.
phreeza 5y ago
From the initial reporting it sounded like there was some kind of "just go" button that overrode the safeties, in which case I would have attributed it to poor self-driving design anyway. But "joystick control" sounds like the driver was much more actively engaged, which is the right thing to require in disengagement situation in my view.
- dmix 5y ago
  All of the recent self driving cars have an override method so the driver can take over. There’s no getting around that. The only thing you can blame here is the human driver not trusting the system which did make the right choice. You could blame training but again it’s not the software to blame. This is the second article that obscured that fact.
  - jimmaswell 5y ago
    This has been a sadly common clickbait/FUD tactic since self driving launched. Another example: https://www.reddit.com/r/savedyouaclick/comments/d35vp9/self_driving_shuttle_crashes_in_las_vegas_hours/ https://www.reddit.com/r/savedyouaclick/comments/d35vp9/self...
  - trhway 5y ago
    >self driving cars have an override method so the driver can take over. There’s no getting around that. you'd expect that self-driving car would have a driver assist like on a regular car which prevents or warns about hitting objects/people. In general, seeing Toyota's self-driving cars around MV, they have too few sensors for my taste (compare to Google, Apple, and a bunch of other SD cars driving around). It seems to me that the hardware companies don't get it, and thus only buying the tech like GM Cruise is the possible way for them to move forward.
  - phreeza 5y ago
    I agree that some kind of fallback is unavoidable at the current level of technology, but the design is critical. Having a "just go" button that disables the safeties and let's the self-driving continue against its own better judgement is very convenient when it works, but terrible design because it trains the safety driver to just always hit it. Having some more active engagement like a joystick, that forces the safety driver to engage with the situation, seems much more reasonable.
notahacker 5y ago
It's pretty ambiguous from that wording whether the "self driving" was at fault or not (if a vehicle had stopped and the manual operative was about to do something it could easily imply the vehicle's computer then behaved unpredictably in a way the joystick didn't cancel out). Possibly because Toyota themselves haven't analysed the telemetry enough to know what caused it yet
jsight 5y ago
Yeah, it is an important detail. But it'd be nice if we had some more details available, like whether or not it was common to have to override the car. I'd expect that might be common at these crossings, and they may have found a significant issue with something like warning/override fatigue or with the controller interface. It makes sense to stop them until they can figure out with certainty why the operator may have made this mistake.

brianwawok 5y ago

> The vehicle had stopped at a T junction and was about to turn under manual control of the operator, who was using the vehicle's joystick control, when the vehicle hit the athlete going at around 1 or 2 kilometres an hour, Toyoda said A driver ran over someone while turning. Not sure this has anything to do with self driving except for the click bait?

dicroce 5y ago
If a remote human controlled car accident causes them to end development of self driving, then they were looking to do that anyway.
- ugjka 5y ago
  This is Japan and their culture. If this happened to Tesla, Elon would just tweet something
- josefx 5y ago
  The headline is click bait. They only stopped use at the Olympic village.
- nonbirithm 5y ago
  They're planning to build an entire city/small town based around autonomous vehicles near Mt. Fuji. https://www.thestreet.com/phildavis/news/toyota-is-building-its-own-autonomous-city-next-to-mount-fuji https://www.thestreet.com/phildavis/news/toyota-is-building-...
gregoriol 5y ago
Maybe the manual controls have a problem, or the mix of self-driving/manual caused a problem? The article doesn't say much, but it may have to do with the design of the system (and not the self-driving itself)
- krisoft 5y ago
  > The article doesn't say much, but it may have to do with the design of the system I'm thinking the same. Obviously I don't know nothing factual. Was looking at this video of how the shuttles look from the inside: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp9DNV0zGC8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp9DNV0zGC8 I observed these things: - it looks like at least on this video the shuttles appear to be in manual operation. - the A pillar is crazy thick. One could hide a whole circus with elephants behind it from the driver. - maybe because of the above, the driver has video screens in front of them. - there appears to be two on-board attendants (a hostess and a driver it seems)

5faulker 5y ago

Reading this while eating.

rnjesus 5y ago
you can’t just stop the story there..

gundmc 5y ago

> “It shows that autonomous vehicles are not yet realistic for normal roads,” he said. Yes, clearly this wasn't Toyota's mistake and is instead a reflection of the entire industry. Nice spin.

plutonorm 5y ago
They are losing to Tesla and they know it. They would rather trash the whole industry than let someone else win
- curiousgal 5y ago
  > Tesla > Self-driving Pick one.
  - bpodgursky 5y ago
    You might not like _how_ Tesla is deploying self-driving, but it would be silly to challenge that they are at minimum tied for the lead right now.
    - jazzyjackson 5y ago
      Tied for the lead in "most likely to get self driving cars banned" sure
mdoms 5y ago
Are you saying that autonomous vehicles are ready for normal roads?
- minhazm 5y ago
  The point here is that this incident doesn’t show anything about autonomous cars, good or bad. This car was actually under a manual operators control at the time of the accident. Also Toyota’s tech is not reflective of everyone else’s tech, there are many different approaches and they’re at very different stages of development.

nashashmi 5y ago

The executive is way too polite compared to the nonsense we are used to hearing from Elon Musk.

gjkood 5y ago

"In a YouTube video, Toyota Chief Executive Akio Toyoda apologized for the incident and said he offered to meet the person but was unable to do so." Is it just me or does it feel refreshing to hear a CEO accepting some responsibility involving one of it's products regardless of what the investigation may finally reveal as the root cause. The buck does indeed stop at his desk.

redwall_hp 5y ago
It's very common with Japanese companies. You should see the statements Naoki Yoshida puts out for Final Fantasy XIV (and he's not even Square Enid's CEO). The player population exploded this summer, causing long login queues and various capacity issues, resulting in an open letter apologizing profusely for not being able to keep up with demand. > As producer, the responsibility for being unable to predict the current influx of new players falls to me. The days before an expansion’s launch are supposed to be ones of excitement, but instead they’ve brought many players grief, and for that I, personally, am extremely sorry. (Excerpted from a long and detailed message that explains the situation, including the semiconductor shortage.) https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/topics/detail/c2d7b35d55577879086b64cfde0acb6c23ccd07f https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/topics/detail/c2d7b... When was the last time you saw a company apologize for their service being too popular?
- harry8 5y ago
  >When was the last time you saw a company apologize for their service being too popular? January this year that I can recall. https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1350638559301013511 https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1350638559301013511
- thatguy0900 5y ago
  https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/japanese-company-apologises-for-9-cent-price-increase-a6972566.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/japanese-co... the cultural differences really are crazy. Here the company would act like it's a good thing

digitcatphd 5y ago

“ Toyoda said the accident showed the difficulty for the self-driving vehicle to operate in the special circumstances..” Toy Yoda is all knowing

avastmick 5y ago

The vehicles have since restarted.[1] I think that Toyota's position on AVs is largely counter to the rest of the market, and the CE largely states this in his post-incident briefing. They see the AV market as more a tram-like shuttle experience [2], so limited in scope, rather than full on Level 5. Toyota's contrary position is similar to their position to BEVs, where the CEO has stated he sees hydrogen as the solution, not batteries. In each case their position is possibly out of date given the advances made in both AVs and battery technology developed elsewhere. [1] https://electrek.co/2021/08/30/toyota-resumes-self-driving-operations-at-paralympic-games-ceo-remains-skeptical-of-autonomous-progress/ https://electrek.co/2021/08/30/toyota-resumes-self-driving-o... [2] https://digital.hbs.edu/platform-rctom/submission/toyotas-answer-to-the-self-driving-era/ https://digital.hbs.edu/platform-rctom/submission/toyotas-an...